I’d be afraid you’d smash it up or run over someone with it. No, child,” she said gravely, as she shook her head. “I’d be afraid to let you drive it. You’re too nervous.”
“Ah-h-h-h-h-h!” he breathed clutching convulsively in his hair as his eyes flickered madly about in his head. “Ah-h-h-h-h! M-m-m-merciful God!” he muttered. “M-m-m-m-m-merciful God!”—and then laughed wildly, frantically, and bitterly.
Now Helen spoke curiously, plucking reflectively at her large chin, but with weariness and resignation in her accent as if already she knew the answer:
“Mama, what are you going to do with your car? It seems a shame to let it rot away back there after you’ve paid out all that money for it. Aren’t you going to try to get any use out of it at all?”
“Well, now, as I say,” Eliza began smugly, pursing her lips with ruminative relish as she looked into the air, “I’m just waitin’for the chance—I’m just waitin’till the first fine day to come along—and then, I’ve got a good notion to take that thing out and learn to run it myself.”
“Oh, Mama,” Helen began quietly and wearily, “good heavens—”
“Why, yes!” Eliza cried nodding her head briskly. “I could do it! Now, I can do most anything when I make my mind up to it! Now I’ve never seen anything yet I couldn’t do if I had to!… So I’m just waitin’until spring comes round again, and I’m goin’to take that car out and drive it all around,” she said. “I’m just goin’to sit up there an’enjoy the scenery an’have a big time,” said Eliza with her little tremulous smile. “That’s what I’m goin’to do,” she said.
“All right,” Helen said wearily. “Have it your own way. Do as you please: it’s your own funeral! Only it seems a shame to let it go to waste after you’ve spent all that money on it.”
But turning to Eugene, and speaking in a lowered tone, she said to him, with the faint tracing of hysteria on her big-decent face and weariness and resignation in her voice:
“Well, what are you going to do about it? I used to think that you could change her, but now I know she never will…. I’ve given up trying. It’s no use,” she muttered. “It’s no use. I worked my fingers to the bone to help them save a copper—and you see what comes of it…. I did the work of a nigger in the kitchen from the time I was ten years old—and you see what comes of it, don’t you? I went off and sang my way around the country in cheap moving-picture shows… and came up here and waited on the tables to help feed a crowd of cheap boarders—and
